PASSENGER PIGEONS

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1638, 7 May 1925, Page 3

PASSENGER PIGEONS

The dramatic disappearance from the face of the earth of the passenger pigeon, a species which a comparatively few years ago existed in untold millions on the North American continent, is one of the most remarkable incidents in the annals of bird life, says the Johannesburg Star. In the edition of the American Check-List published in 1912 fears were expressed that the race had become extinct, and it was stated that “researches were being made to find some possible survivors of a bird once so abundant. The search was unavailing. There now seems no possible doubt that the solitary females that died in the Zoological Garden at Cincinnati in 1912 (or T 3) after being 19 years in captivity, was the 'last of a marvellous race. So far as the London Zoo is concerned, the last passenger pigeons were received by the society in 1883. There were three examples, two of which died in 1884, and the third in 1889.

Now the question arises how the sudden decline and extinction of so prolific a race came about. It may be argued that the immense toll taken of the flocks by man would lead to extermination (as in the case of the American buffalo), but against this it may be said that in view of the vast areas, often sparsely populated, that the birds covered, some isolated colonies would surely rehiain. Again, the killing was no new thing: it had been going on for centuries, and yet the end came abruptly in the few years following 1870. Another theory is that seme microbe infection may have arisen, which, owing to the density of the gatherings, proved fatal, but on this no.evidentce exists.

Mr Percy Lowe, of the Briti h Museum, has made a suggestion that is well worthy of consideration—namely, that the swift and tumultuous passing of a species that had attained to altogether abnormal numbers may possibly be regarded as a final orgy or riot of reproductive energy. “We may think,” he writes, “of something akin to an abnormal stimulation or feverish exhaustion of the germ plasm. . . We may falncifully compare it with the last flaring up of the dying spark of life in a race which was already doomed and approaching its end, or to a resplendent finale to the original creative impulse with which the species was launched from the ‘family tree’ to run its inevitable course. We may think of it as a race whose germ potency had, so to speak, ‘outrun the constable,’ like so many races we have knowledge of in past geological ages; but instead of running to fantastic sizes, as in the case of so many reptiles whose doom -was sealed, it rioted in a spendthrift revelry of numbers, which led to exhaustion and extinction.”